I was looking back over the early days of this blog and I found this blast from the past. It was actually in August 2009, my first-ever trip to the Gaula with Charles ‘Off-road’ Cooke. Charlie and I found this magazine in the Norwegian Flyfishers’ Club’s Tilseth farmhouse where we were staying. Cult reading and we latched on to the Paul Whitehouse comedy phrase ‘Let’s Off-Road’ as a rallying call when we had to head back to the river (the tracks thereabouts, certainly on the right bank, being very much off-road). The view in the late-summer half-light through the window gives a hint of the bucolic fishing wonderland that is the Gaula valley, just out of shot off to the left is the eponymous Tilseth Run pool.

So there it is, we’re well over half way through the winter and a summer of light evenings and silver fish running our rivers beckons.

The Nith opens tomorrow, other rivers are well under way, but starting slowly in Scotland which is hardly surprising given the extraordinary volumes of water in the early days of 2016. Even though I’m not going there this year, here’s a shot of the head of Middle Varzuga’s world-famous Generator pool which I took in midsummer, 2014 just to get the juices flowing. Looking back at my phone records I see it was 5pm, Russia time, on the Wednesday of the week and I had just caught a salmon and was to get one or two (I think four!) more before dinner that evening, happy days: